Canadian Investigation Found Facebook To Be Violating Privacy Laws

On Thursday, Canadian officials said that owing to its assailable security algorithms, Facebook exposed sensitive information of millions of its users. It has been counted as a critical failure on the company’s part which it did admit to letting happen but denied to fix.

Facebook has violated local as well as national laws when it gave access to private data of millions of its users to third parties, according to an investigation conducted by the information and privacy commissioner of British Columbia and the privacy commissioner for Canada.

The company CEO, Mark Zuckerberg put forth an apology for the major breach of trust that happened in the political scandal associated with Cambridge Analytica, however, they did not take into consideration the issued recommendations regarding the prevention of further exploitation of user data.

Putting the same into perspective, at a news conference, Daniel Therrien, head at federal privacy watchdog, said, “There’s a significant gap between what they say and what they do,”

As the regulators decided to push Facebook to a Canadian federal court which is likely to impose fines on the company, Mr. Therrien told that, “historically there have been very small penalties — in the tens of thousands of dollars.”

Facebook told the investigators that it does not agree with their findings, in response, Mr. Therrien said, “I find that absolutely untenable that a company can tell a regulator that it does not respect its findings.”

Furthermore, he asserted the need to have more authorities for the inspection of companies and even strict privacy laws in the North American country, Canada.

Reportedly, Facebook has denied audits of its privacy procedures and said that it has taken necessary measures against the problems raised by the investigators.

Referenced from the statements given by Facebook on the account, “there’s no evidence that Canadians’ data was shared with Cambridge Analytica, and we’ve made dramatic improvements to our platform to protect people’s personal information.”

“After many months of good-faith cooperation and lengthy negotiations, we are disappointed” that regulators consider the issues raised in this report unresolved,” the company added.